Once a week, students do a “Mind Dump” activity, which involves 3-5 minutes of recall from the previous week.
Class information
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) is a 4-year private science and engineering college. Calculus at RHIT is taught in sections of 25-30 students, 10 week quarters, 5 days/week, one class period/day. My sections are taught in a tablet room. Each day incorporates some active learning. Students are math, science, and engineering majors. They are very good at numeric and symbolic manipulation but have varying degrees of comfort with more conceptual aspects of mathematics. On the whole they tend not to like writing assignments.
Logistics
Once a week, students do a “Mind Dump” activity.
3-5 minutes of recall from previous week
Compare with classmates
Specifications graded (acceptable/not)
General feedback in class –2-3 minutes/week
Description of activity
Students were given the following prompt:
Mind dump
Front side of the page:
Your name
Without looking at your notes, what can you remember from last week?
general topics (i.e. section titles)
learning objectives, tasks
other?
List as much as you can
Back side of the page:
Work with someone you haven't worked with before
Your name and your partner's name(s)
(_ worked with __)
This exercise was taken from Linda Nilson's Creating Self-regulated Learners, Chapter 3. Reflective thinking can deepen student learning, but students need guidance and practice to develop it. According to How Learning Works by Ambrose, et. al., “It is important to give students an opportunity to reflect on assignments. Facilitating their reflection with specific questions can help structure the process to support motivation.” and “To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.”
Table of Contents
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Summary
Once a week, students do a “Mind Dump” activity, which involves 3-5 minutes of recall from the previous week.
Class information
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) is a 4-year private science and engineering college. Calculus at RHIT is taught in sections of 25-30 students, 10 week quarters, 5 days/week, one class period/day. My sections are taught in a tablet room. Each day incorporates some active learning. Students are math, science, and engineering majors. They are very good at numeric and symbolic manipulation but have varying degrees of comfort with more conceptual aspects of mathematics. On the whole they tend not to like writing assignments.
Logistics
Once a week, students do a “Mind Dump” activity.
Description of activity
Students were given the following prompt:
Mind dump
Front side of the page:
- Your name
- Without looking at your notes, what can you remember from last week?
- general topics (i.e. section titles)
- learning objectives, tasks
- other?
- List as much as you can
Back side of the page:(_ worked with __)
Comments
Development of this activity was funded by the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE).
Background/Theory
This exercise was taken from Linda Nilson's Creating Self-regulated Learners, Chapter 3. Reflective thinking can deepen student learning, but students need guidance and practice to develop it. According to How Learning Works by Ambrose, et. al., “It is important to give students an opportunity to reflect on assignments. Facilitating their reflection with specific questions can help structure the process to support motivation.” and “To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.”
Related Activities
This activity followed the daily Homework Confidence Reflections and fed into the "Exam Reflection" activity.
Aims
Immediate goals for this exercise include:
Broader goals include:
Feedback/Assessment
Mind Dumps elicited a wide range of degrees of effort, from very superficial to very detailed.